Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson said Friday that he’s grateful the rest of the country has sat up and taken notice of the tragic slaying of Trayvon Martin. But he can’t help but wonder: Why has it taken so long for everyone else to recognize the chronic injustices that African Americans face?

“We’re surprised that everyone else is surprised,” Jackson told the Los Angeles Times. African Americans have tried for decades to get the rest of America to understand their plight, he said, particularly their beliefs that justice is still elusive in many parts of America, especially the Deep South.

Then along comes the Trayvon Martin case, and facts that are not in contention: Volunteer neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman pursued and then gunned down the unarmed 17-year-old last month, and never faced arrest because police said there was no evidence to contradict his claim that he fired in self-defense.

Jackson was speaking Friday morning from the Chicago offices of his Rainbow PUSH Coalition. He had just returned from duties in Belgium and Switzerland.

Jackson said the Martin case is getting plenty of media attention overseas, attention that is both embarrassing to white America and humiliating to black America.

Moreover, he said, the failure to make an arrest in the case takes away the nation’s “moral authority” to address injustices in other countries when it fails to do the same within its own borders.

Jackson said that there is a mistaken assumption in some corners of America that all racial problems went away with the election of President Obama. “There was this feeling that we were kind of beyond racism,” he said. “That’s not true. His victory has triggered tremendous backlash.”

He added: “Blacks are under attack.” African American families are facing record home foreclosures and unemployment. Their children are burdened with student loan debt [apparently white people don’t have student loans -ed]. States, particularly conservative ones, are passing voter laws that leaders know will disenfranchise blacks and other minorities. Meanwhile, the nation’s prisons are brimming with black faces, he said, and their numbers that suggest that the legal system is quicker to send blacks to prison than whites.